Ionesco makes his chilling NT debut
Exit the King National’s Olivier Theatre
Lovably scraggy Welsh actor Rhys Ifans, 51, seems to have ants in his pants at the moment, charging from one high-profile stage performance to the next.
In the past 18 months, he has been a dishevelled, rapscallion Fool to Glenda Jackson’s King Lear at the Old Vic, and a furtive, haunted Scrooge in A Christmas Carol there too. Now he leads Patrick Marber’s new NT version of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist classic Le Roi se meurt (1962) in a meaty tragicomic role that seems to combine elements of Fool, Lear and Scrooge.
After a fantastical 483 years of existence, King Berenger the First is facing his final curtain: mortality has come knocking, and it’s not going to be fobbed off. With his kingdom sliding ever further into symbolic apocalyptic ruin, his magical powers gone, the ailing monarch is incredulous, outraged and pathetically determined to cling to the hope of recovery. Those in attendance – his spurned first Queen, his favoured second spouse, a physician, a guard, a domestic skivvy – look on with a mixture of impatience, officiousness and tacit sympathy. They’re undisguisedly counting down to the moment when he will shuffle off the stage of life.
That exit, when it comes, entails a scenic astonishment that I won’t spoil here (design Anthony Ward). He has already dwindled by this point of vanishment – eyesight failed, mind gone – but the concluding image of departure and voyage into the unknown sears itself into your retinas.
Alec Guinness played Berenger at the UK premiere in 1963 at the Royal Court and Ifans – who made his name internationally as the slobbish Spike in Notting Hill – stands comparison with the best in his performance here. There’s initially something reptilian about him as he totters into view, divesting himself of his ceremonial robes to reveal sleek blue PJS, darting dissatisfied glances, his mouth twisted and cruel – more than a hint of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Child Catcher with his ghost-white face paint and long, lank hair.
When he exchanges his pointy gold crown for a woollen bobble hat, sheds that wig to reveal white, Becketty wisps, and lets the make-up smudge in sweat, he becomes at once more appalling and pitiable. The look of a frightened child spasms across his face. “I should have been warned!” he growls, while Indira Varma’s Queen Marguerite, in exquisite regalia, looks on aloof – her disdainful iciness in contrast to the down-to-earth tactility of Amy Moran’s Queen Marie, yet eventually, movingly, melting in a lyrical adieu.
Put bluntly, when the “existentialist” element is to the fore, you feel the cosmic shiver of the human condition. When the evening attempts lower-case absurdist larks, you may be afflicted by shudders of boredom. There’s a lot of embellishment and restatement of the blooming obvious. And, directed by Marber, the supporting actors often look a little stranded on such an expanse of stage. Among the serving cohort, Debra Gillett’s pratfalling caricature charlady harvests the most laughs, and there’s only so much comic mileage in the sudden opening and closing of hidden scenery flaps.
Still, bringing Ionesco to the National for the first time, this serves a valuable enough theatrical function. And if, 20 summers on from a life-affirming NT revival of Oklahoma!, I felt the odd pang for the crowd-pleasing reign of good King Trevor, there’s also no denying the uses, even in a heatwave, of a chilling memento mori.